Virtualized media data centers
Sep 1, 2010 12:00 PM, By Luc Andries
The virtualized media data center implementation effectively ran the workflow and clearly simplified the resulting data flow.
Ultimately, the test demonstrated the following advantages of this approach:
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Total overall workflow execution time was 80 percent faster than the traditional architecture (with the transcoding speed, not the network, setting the maximum speed).
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Total file transfers were reduced by an order of magnitude.
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The virtualized media data center performed all processing steps, offloading all media traffic from the IP network and making optimal use of available CPU and memory resources.
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No excess, duplicate, or intermediate copies of media files were stored.
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There were no bottlenecks of the 10Gb/s lossless cluster network in any of the workflow steps.
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High-resolution material was made available to editing clients immediately after ingest, with no double wrapping/unwrapping process required.
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No time-consuming transfers of high-resolution material to external storage systems were necessary.
Conclusion
We have demonstrated that implementing media services on a virtualized media data center mounted on clustered central storage shortens transport paths and dramatically simplifies data flows compared with today's common file-based media architectures. This approach can reduce the number of file transfers, reduce IP network traffic by 90 percent or more and improve workflow execution time by 80 percent. For media network architects, the ability to radically reduce dependencies on the client IP network will also make it much easier to design a media-aware client network capable of handling bursty media traffic, and avoid bottlenecks and performance issues.
Luc Andries is a senior infrastructure architect and storage and network expert with VRT-medialab/IBBT/CandIT-media.
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